Another interesting example would have been the killing of Osama Bin Laden on May 1, 2011, which broke at 10:40 p.m. with a sparse report from Helene Cooper:

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden has been killed, a United States official said. President Obama is expected to make an announcement on Sunday night, almost 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In some cases, we can see how a story can substantially change as more reporting comes in, such as in a story that
helped inspired this project: the article about the arrests of Occupy Wall Street protestors on October 1, 2011. Two versions, twenty
minutes apart, had substantially different first
paragraphs about the arrests of Occupy Wall Street protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011.
The criticism it received was perhaps unfair, but it's hard to determine since the earlier version is
no longer publicly available.

Why the name NewsDiffs?

A diff is a popular tool in computer programming that outputs the differences between two files. It is typically used to show the changes between one version of a file and a former version of the same file. This idea of version control is well known within software engineering, and should be used in journalism as journalism moves toward constantly evolving versions of news stories.
We have had many sessions at many newsy foo and bar camps on "Github for news." Well, this time, we literally put the news into git.

How NewsDiffs Works

NewsDiffs regularly looks at the stories that are linked to (or have been linked to)
from the homepage of major online news publications, starting with nytimes.com and cnn.com. It parses them and stores them in a git repository.

The records start June 17, 2012.

Not all articles are stored. Only those with changes are displayed. NewsDiffs focuses mostly on ones that
are linked from the homepage.

Greg, who works at Tddium, has his masters in theoretical computer science from MIT and a bachelors in
mathematics from Harvard. (He also led the YouTomb project, which tracked videos removed from
YouTube). Eric is currently in his fourth year of a PhD in theoretical computer science from MIT. Jenny was a reporter at The New York Times for nine years, wonders what it's like to be a product manager and has been
tortured by missing semicolons.